CYLAND presents
CYBERFEST 2014 SOUND ART ST PETERSBURG
Featuring: Ken Butler
Curated by: CYLAND
Dates: November 5-9, 2014
Venue: The Youth Educational Center of the State Hermitage
Address: Palace Square 6-8, St Petersburg
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The CYBERFEST ST PETERSBURG SOUND ART program presents a live sound art performance and workshop from the internationally acclaimed Ken Butler.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS & ARTWORKS SELECTED:
KEN BUTLER
“HYBRID VISIONS”
Exhibition, Performance & Workshop
KEN BUTLER is a renowned sound artist known for his “Hybrid" instruments. He is internationally recognized as an innovator of experimental sound which he creates from diverse materials including tools, sports equipment and household objects. He has exhibited and performed extensively throughout the USA, Canada, South America, Japan and Europe including at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Lincoln Center and The Metropolitan Museum among other important venues.
Butler's works have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, Smithsonian, and Sculpture Magazine and have been featured on PBS, CNN, MTV, and NBC, including a live appearance on The Tonight Show. Awards include fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pollack/Krasner Foundation. Exhibiting in Russia for the first time, Ken Butler’s free performance kicks off CYBERFEST. Butler will also lead youth in a special, hands-on sound invention workshop.
Ken Butler’s hybrid musical instrument sculptures, performances, and other artworks explore the interaction and transformation of common and uncommon objects, sounds, and altered images as function and form collide in the intersections of art and music.
Created primarily from urban detritus, the hybrid instruments express a poetic spirit of re-invention and hyper-utility as hidden meanings and associations momentarily create a striking and re-animated cultural identity for common objects. String instruments become body, tool, weapon, toy, symbol, machine, phallus, creature, sculpture, icon, and voice. Pianos and keyboards become cybernetic and symbolic architecture. Anxious objects speak in tongues...
The artist-musician performs mesmerizing world textures and driving melodic grooves with passion and purpose on an amazing arsenal of amplified hybrid string instruments made from household objects and tools. Duchampian Dada meets Hybrid Hindu Hendrix as function and form collide in an environment of hyperactive hardware. Musical influences include Indian Raga, Middle Eastern, and Roma music mixed with a noisy «downtown» improv aesthetic all held together by African-American jazz and blues?
Virtually indescribable and unclassifiable, Butler mixes high and low technology and audio-visual antics to create an ancient/future music that forms a provoking cultural portrait of human/machine adaptation and transformation.
(single session, adaptable from K — 8th grade) For up to 30 students, perhaps more.
Using demonstrations and simple materials, artist/musician Ken Butler explores the basics of how sound is produced by vibration, how to describe it, and how it can be amplified and processed with microphones. The artist shows how simple instruments can be created from readily available household objects. Participants in the “hands-on” demonstrations discover the relation between sound, noise, and music and hear their voices altered with electronic effects. Various objects like scissors, paper, and rubber bands are amplified and played as the nature of musical instruments is discussed.
In longer workshop residencies students make drawings of imaginary instruments and create their own simple string instrument from a coffee can and other simple materials.
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ABOUT THE VENUE: THE YOUTH EDUCATIONAL CENTER OF THE STATE HERMITAGE MUSEUM
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The Youth Educational Center of the State Hermitage is the State Hermitage Museum's dedicated department devoted to the creation of experimental educational and cultural programs for students and young people from St. Petersburg, other Russian cities and from abroad. Programs have been designed to include courses and workshops from some of the most significant figures in art and culture, lectures on the history and theory of art, and so much more.
